The drives were numerous (hard, floppy, tape, optical), and the noises were too loud to avoid using diagnostically. Printers clacked and whooshed (and sometimes moved furniture). Scanners sang songs. Monitors produced clicks and pops and buzzes and sizzles, and the flyback transformer would continuously whine at different frequencies depending on mode. Modems made dialing and shrieking noises. Sound cards were anything but silent; a person could hear noises that varied based on the work the system was doing. And for a long while, CPUs and/or front side bus speeds put a lot of noise right in the middle of the FM dial.
During the 2010s: I was very done with floppy, and tape, and nearly done with optical media. My laptop no longer had a modem built-in and it took me months to notice this. I gave up on printing expensive color images at home (and began ordering inexpensive dye-sub or photographic prints), and laser printers (that could print any color desired as long it was black) were cheap and quiet and most of the surviving "old" examples were new enough to no longer smell strongly of ozone; the reciprocating print mechanisms of yore were simply gone. The scanner no longer sings. Essentially-silent LCD monitors had replaced the CRTs. Internal sound cards had become quite good at being silent, and during that time also became excellent at being irrelevant. SSDs became common (and big/cheap enough to use) on most normal systems. Even cooling fans were getting quieter, probably thanks to the combined effects of the introduction of standardized PWM and Noctua's influence (both in 2005): By the 2010s, building a very quiet PC was no longer the dark art it had been in parts of the 90s.
At least in my world, the sound of computing had changed quite a bit over the span of decades from the 90s to the 2010s.
The only incidentally-noisy computing things I had left at the end of the teens were the hard drives of ever-increasing size that got used for storing Linux ISOs.
Fair. I didn't have tape in the 2010s. I definitely had archives on floppy in the 2010s but by the end of the decade I was done with them. But only in the last couple years has my desktop become fully solid state.
The drives were numerous (hard, floppy, tape, optical), and the noises were too loud to avoid using diagnostically. Printers clacked and whooshed (and sometimes moved furniture). Scanners sang songs. Monitors produced clicks and pops and buzzes and sizzles, and the flyback transformer would continuously whine at different frequencies depending on mode. Modems made dialing and shrieking noises. Sound cards were anything but silent; a person could hear noises that varied based on the work the system was doing. And for a long while, CPUs and/or front side bus speeds put a lot of noise right in the middle of the FM dial.
Computing is pretty quiet these days.